‘Take phones from under-11s’
THE Government should issue guidance telling parents not to give smartphones to under-11s, a leading Royal College psychiatrist has said.
Dr Jon Goldin, vice-chairman of the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ child and adolescent faculty, said official advice not to give children a smartphone until the first year of secondary school at the earliest would help parents resist their offspring’s demands.
He also warned that children should spend no more than two hours a day on social media amid evidence that doing so makes them more likely to become depressed and anxious.
Dr Goldin’s comments come in advance of a report by a college working party, which he is part of, on the impact of children spending excessive time online and what needs to be done.
He said there was a correlation between a rise in depression, particularly among women aged 16 to 24, and the emergence of the smartphone a decade ago. This had been fuelled by cyberbullying, body image issues, material
promoting self-harm and eating disorders and children’s anxiety from feeling the need to be constantly online to avoid missing out, he said.
“Children often say to their parents, ‘All my friends are [getting phones] and you are not allowing me to do that,’” said Dr Goldin, consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London. “I don’t think we can legislate, but this guidance would back parents up when they were having conversations with their 10-year-olds.”
Almost 40 per cent of eight to 11-yearolds have smartphones, but a poll of 1,000 parents for the Priory group of mental health clinics found 67 per cent of parents would back the Government legislating on an appropriate age for the use of smartphones. Over four in 10 (44per cent) supported a ban on children under 16 having smartphones.
Dr Hayley van Zwanenberg, a child and adolescent psychiatrist and associate medical director of the Priory group, said schools should help parents develop pacts where they agreed not to buy their children smartphones “perhaps even up to GCSE”.
“Then parents can say ‘no’ to smartphones and resist pester power,” she said.
The Royal College of Psychiatrists’ report is expected to endorse The Daily Telegraph’s Duty of Care campaign for regulation to protect children from online harms and to call for more research into the impact of new technology on mental health. This newspaper is proposing a statutory duty of care on the firms.
Dr Goldin said: “We don’t think the social media companies are policing themselves adequately. Their interest is in getting more money and advertisers. We are supporting more legislation in this area … more robust age verification as an absolute minimum.”
Based on studies and his own experience, Dr Goldin, a father-of-two, also believed a limit of two hours a day on children’s use of social media was appropriate. “Much more than two hours becomes more problematic,” he said.